SEO Best Practices

SEO (Search Engine Optimization), PPC (Pay per click), and the various other means of increasing the visibility of your business online; At the end of the day, your online marketing is actually a combination of all of these.

The internet has already taken over so many offline activities; we are almost doing everything online. There is hardly any business that does not have an online presence. It is no longer something that a business considers but by default builds the online marketing activity into its marketing campaign.

Out of all of these activities, SEO is certainly an activity which is ongoing. The initial effort towards optimizing a website for search engines and visitors is immense, but once the major effort has been put in, it does not require the same kind of mammoth effort; what is required is the ongoing work so that you can keep up and ahead of your competition.

PPC can be used to quickly get relevant visitors, once the SEO work starts to show results, PPC can be tapered off. This of course depends upon the marketing strategy that a business employs.

So what do marketers do on an ongoing basis to ensure that their websites keep ranking well, and the traffic to their web site keeps growing?

One thing is to keep a close watch at the web analytics report, that tells marketers almost everything , and much more about the health of the website. They can find information that can be used to better the user’s experience during their visit. This is one of the ongoing things that every webmaster needs to do.

Besides this, in my earlier article we discussed how a newly launched website can get more relevant traffic and sales by tying up with online coupon sites.

These coupon sites already enjoy a good numbers of visitors because of the attractive discounts they offer. Getting into a contract with such sites will help any business new or existing in many ways:-

1. This is your chance to showcase your service and product; you have a customer walking into your store for a product or service. By providing your best service to the customer, the customer might end up buying more products or even secure another appointment with you.

2. A satisfied customer will go back and spread the good word. The best part is, the amount of goodwill this will create for you, not only will you gain a customer; you will now have a satisfied customer talking about your services!

3. Some customers might write good reviews about your service/products; even better for you.

The idea after is to get relevant visitors to your store, to try out your products and services and then to make them your loyal customer.

The basic strategy should be to combine SEO and some more online marketing strategy in such a way that they work together to bring in the desired results.

Once you get an idea of which services are the most popular, you can introduce a new section in your website regarding that particular product/service. This will be a fresh content for your website; thus helping your SEO efforts.

You can run a short term PPC campaign on the selected products and services in order to maximize traffic.

Make a noise about it in your home page, link this section from every page and get as many visitors as possible engaged in that section.

Get a Press Release done on your products and services and get it published across all new sites.

All these combined activities will not only help in getting your SEO rankings up, it will fulfill your ultimate aim, higher conversions.

Now isn’t this a wonderful amalgamation of the various online marketing strategies?

How do you know if web site is optimized, over optimized or under optimized?

To begin with, in order to find out if your web site is under-optimized; just do a few basic checks like:

1. Title tag
2. Description tag and
3. Content of the web site

Analyzing the above features will give you an idea whether your website’s  on-page optimization is optimal. If any of the above features does not follow the SEO best practices, you may be missing out on the opportunity to get traffic to your site.  However, if you find that all of the above-mentioned features and more is present in your website, you may want to find out if it is overtly done. It is indeed not a good SEO practice to go overboard and over-optimize your website so much that it might seem like spamming.

For example, if you sell flowers online, your web site should be able to convey the message through the titles,descriptions, and the content of your web site. What you need to check is if these features are able to describe, and tell both the search engines and the visitors what to expect in the site.

If we do a search on your website with the keyword “flowers” and your web site glows like a Christmas tree, it means you are overdoing the keyword bit!

The content and the appearance of keywords have to appear natural, it can’t be forced. Do similar checks on the internal links, on the titles, of every page of your site. If you find that your website is indeed over-optimized, I recommend, you start working on every page and tone it down. It might give you a change to do a content re-evaluation, and that might do wonders for your web site.

If your website is optimized well, and is still not ranking, don’t lose heart. Keep working on your off-page optimization strategy. Remember slow and steady wins the race , and it still holds good.

Long tailed keywords; What are they?

To put it simply, long tailed keywords are keywords that are more descriptive. This means, they are very specific.

Let’s just say you are looking for a driving school near your locality. If you simply type in “driving school” in any of the search engines, you will get a whole lot of sites that are relevant to deriving schools but may not be relevant for you since you are looking for a driving school near your locality.

More and more searchers are realizing the value of typing in keywords that are more descriptive i.e. long tailed keywords. So in the above-mentioned example, it could be something like “driving schools near <location>. These keywords will indicate to the search engines what the searcher is searching for, the search engines will then fetch web pages that are relevant to the search terms used for searching.

From the SEO perspective, it is a good idea to use long tailed keywords when optimizing your web pages. Not only will you find visitors who are interested, the chances of conversions are very high indeed! Long tailed keywords usually do not have as much competition as keywords that are more generic, so your site will have a fair chance of ranking as well.

More and more searchers type in exactly what they are looking for. Almost all the searchers have little patience to sift through many sites since many of them search from their mobile phone and they want to get the information as fast as possible.

If your web site SEO strategy does not consider long tailed keywords, you might be missing out on precious traffic.

Earlier there were search engines and search directories. Searchers  would go to Google, Yahoo! MSN, Altavista, Askjeeves, Dmoz etc to search for anything they wanted.

Those were the days when we talked and discussed about the search engines…which one is better…Google or Yahoo! or Altavista or maybe MSN?

Directories like Yahoo! and Dmoz directories were and are very organized and since submissions were verified and accepted manually, one was sure to get authentic sites. In fact, if your site is registered in search directories such as, Dmoz and Yahoo! Directory it would give your site a lot of mileage and still does. Google was still in the process of bettering its search results page and we would quite often get a lot of irrelevant sites on searching.

From then and now, what has changed?

a) Search engines have really got better at the game, the results displayed on the SERPs are almost always bang on. Just type in the keyword on any search engine like Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and you are bound to get an answer to your query in a jiffy.

B )Today we are spoilt for choices… If it exists, it’s on Google they say! Besides that we have a choice of social networking sites like Facebook, Stumble upon, an authoritative site such as Wikipedia… what else can we ask for?

c) Almost everyone has any information they need at their fingertips, how fascinating is that! In a country like India, even if you visit the remotest of location, you will always find mobile stores selling mobile phones and connections. Cable operators provide internet connections as well. There are surfing joints in every locality.

The search engine wars still exist but today almost everyone knows Google and Yahoo! And I think Google is still in the lead because of it’s clean interface, it still has just that search box and therefore minimizes any sort of distraction for the users. The searchers go to Google to search and they do just that. Yahoo! Which is an equally good search engine, probably is the 2nd best choice because of quite a few factors but I would say that its interface is a bit distracting.

Essentially because it is more than a search engine, it is more of a search portal, a one stop shop for everything, which is great but to a searcher, it helps, if the searcher can go to a page an search without too many distractions.

Google has many of the features that Yahoo! has but because of the clean uncluttered interface and of course relevant results, it is so popular. Social networking sites have got even more popular, if your friend likes something, you would like to check it out too, right? And that’s how it works.

Most people are connected to Facebook from their mobiles, in fact quite a major proportion of the population search from their mobiles. With search and online experience getting more and more sophisticated and user friendly, I wonder what is next?

From a visitor’s perspective, it is best to learn to search with keywords that will bring up the most relevant site in a jiffy. From the webmaster’s perspective, it is ideal if their site comes up on the top of the search engine results page whenever a searcher searches with relevant keywords.

This is the most desirable result.

However, this is not easily achievable. There is no specific method or process to solve this or to arrive at a solution, it is a practice. Just uploading fresh content often will not ensure decent rankings, and neither will incoming links from hundreds of sites. To some extent these may help, if these links are from relevant, authoritative sites.

The whole online promotions and Search engine optimization process is very dynamic.I never get tired of saying that.And it is true.

For instance, you may find that a site, probably with content that was updated five months back, ranking very high on search engines. So, it is definitely not content that is of always weighed heavily, it is important but at the end of the day, I think what is important is how popular your site is even when there is not much of fresh content being uploaded. It is essential that the site has enough material to pull visitors all the time. Of course, it does not mean that a site that does not update content very often has stopped promoting the site.You will find that these sites have links across good authoritative sites and are well represented on social networking sites as well.

The point I am making here is that there is a need for continuous online promotions and an online strategy that matches the current search requirement. A Webmaster needs to apply all of this in order to increase the visitors or traffic to the site. It is important that your site is well represented across all channels online. If you cannot add fresh content to your site on a regular basis, what you could do is ensure that you participate in forum discussions, twit about your business and participate. Also, try to get links from good authoritative sites, this will help because more people will know about your site and some will definitely drop in. Just make your presence felt, participate and help others.

In order to be in sync with your visitors, it is best to find out their favourite haunts and befriend them, help them and that will be the beginning of a relationship that can last forever. The more you talk to them the more you will find what they, what they are searching for. This is very valuable as it will help in fine tuning your site to your visitors needs.

Out of sight, out of mind. This is a webmaster’s nightmare. Do not let it happen to your sites. Keep the channels of communication open. Keep up the visibility at all times.

To best explain the evolution of websites, web site design, and SEO, I will divide this article into three phases-

Phase I- The Bygone era of website design and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

In the 90s when the internet started to get popular in terms of businesses starting to have a presence on the internet; I remember, it still took a lot of convincing for many businesses, especially small business owners to consider having an online presence. Back then, having an online presence was mostly like displaying a brochure online.  Many of these online businesses would put up their brochures online. That’s it. From the design perspective, businesses would not want to spend much on designing. Sometimes the whole page would be a huge image, sometimes just a few lines of text with contact numbers and an email id. Only a few businesses would perhaps have a full fledged website. As far as Search engine optimization goes, the maximum that Search Engine Optimizers (SEO was coming into being then and there weren’t really that many people doing SEO) could do was to provide titles, descriptions, and keyword Meta tags, and suggest the sites to search engines and search directories. The part that I liked back then is the ease with which web sites could rank with a relevant keyword; understandable since there were hardly that many sites competing, and SEO was even rarer!

Here, I will draw an analogy with constructing a home or building. We need a house, we do not have a house …so what do we do?

We construct a basic, very functional house; it serves the purpose, but is not really visually appealing. It’s just that; a house with rooms and walls to serve a purpose. I guess there wasn’t time or the need to mull over the finer aspects like making it attractive, it has to be constructed, and so be it.

Phase II- The evolving era of website designing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

With the availabilty of better tools, and more service providers coming into the field, the internet got a big boost, a new era of web designers were born, they design really beautiful web sites, with frames, with animations, flash, etc. But are these sites user friendly? Can people get to these sites? Do these sites download fast? Are they accessible?
From the SEO perspective, many search engines could not index such websites, because of heavy applications and images, websites took ages to download. That took away the patience of the visitors as well. We created beautiful websites but not many could find them! Finally when they did, they could not find everything on the site!

Again, if we draw an analogy with constructing a building, we construct beautiful home, spend huge amount of money to make it look beautiful, but are these homes safe, practical, and functional too?

Phase III -The new generation of web sites, website designers, and Search Engine Optimizers

We have a new generation of web designers who are familiar with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) nuances, they design keeping in mind various factors so that the end result is a perfect balance beauty and functionality. Striking this cord of course is not easy, one has to test and test and test constantly.

The point that is evident today is that we will see designers, developers, and Search Engine Optimizers work together. Today, almost everyone who has access to the internet has either shopped online, has downloaded eBooks, bought tickets, and much more. Websites are getting better and better, search engines results are very relevant these days.

And again, drawing an anology with constructing buildings; we have multi storied complexes that are functional and yet are not bad looking. A good amount of time is spent on planning and ensuring that there is a perfect marriage of beauty and functionality. The buildings are modern, eco friendly, and user friendly. Interesting!

Designing will continue to evolve and so will SEO, but they have to go hand in hand in order to provide the best to the end users. In summary, website designing has evolved into a creative science, creating website’s that are user friendly, good looking, and SEO friendly too!

For more on SEO and Website design, you can also check out this article on SEO and best practices for Website Designing that I wrote some time back.

Most internet marketers today focus on PPC to get them their leads online. While it is true that PPC is the fastest and the most effective way of generating leads; can we ignore leads that we get from SEO efforts?

Your best practices for lead generation should also include SEO lead generation.

SEO impacts almost all your online activities. Be it submitting news to PR sites, optimizing content in the Social networking sites or even getting affiliates for your products/ services.

Many visitors visit your site from links that have been acquired because of SEO efforts. These visits may many at times end in a conversion. Since SEO percolates down to almost each and every medium- search, Social media, news sites, affiliate sites, the chances of visitors coming in to your site from these sources are very high.

The need for today is to have a holistic online marketing strategy. The strategy should not ignore the leads that your website receives from SEO efforts. Today people are not solely dependent on search engines to provide them the answers, most people use Social networking sites. Marketers cannot effort to miss out on the opportunities available from Social networking sites.

Search Engine Optimization, even though a slow process, once it gets going, it develops a network so wide that there is no stopping the benefits that you as a marketer can reap from it.

Go ahead and track the leads that come through your SEO and Social networking efforts. After all, for SEO leads you won’t have to pay for every click. If you are focused on lead generation, make sure that all your pages, especially the SEO optimized content  pages (and not just the landing pages that are created specifically for PPC), have your forms so that you can track easily which pages are bringing in the leads. Go on, work on both SEO, Social medial marketing, and PPC, and watch your revenues grow.

The most important investment that you can make for SEO is time. Just find time to work on optimizing the content on your own site and Social networking sites. You can hire a SEO professional who can to do this for you, if you do not have that much time to spare. Spread your content and links all over the internet. You will find that the benefits of SEO are manifold.

In  my earlier post I touched upon the “Visitors” and “Traffic Overview” sections of the Google Analytics report, today I will take up the “Content” section of the Analytics report. It is a part that will specially help you in analyzing your SEO efforts. You can reach the content part from the dashboard in two easy steps as shown below:
 
 

What is there in the content section of Google Analytics?

To me this is the most interesting section; I can spend a lot of time here. You can find valuable little gems of information here. I just love it!
The content section provides the details such as- Content overview, top content, content by title, content drilldown, Top landing pages, Top exit pages, and In-page Analytics (this one is my favourites)

Top content-This gives you the most viewed pages of your site.

The Google Analytics “About this report” summary on this page provides a very apt description of what to expect from this section and how to analyze it.

Content by title: Is the same as above but it is easier to read because it provides the titles of your top pages; you can quickly recognize the pages when you search your most viewed content by title. As mentioned in the report, you can optimize your pages based on bounce rates, exits etc.If your top content page has a  high bounce rate, it is critical that you revisit it in terms of design, content, and associated links on that page. It may also be that the title of the page is misleading; visitors come to your page expecting something and they get something else. And therefore bounce away from the page. Not good. But the good news is you can optimize these pages easily. You can test and find out if the newly optimized page fares better.SEO plays a huge part here because you may need to analyze the keywords, the title, and description tags, the anchor texts, and many more factors on each of these pages. Optimizing your page would mean working on almost all of these elements. On-page SEO is after all a sum total of various key elements of a page. Some of them may look not so significant and small, but their overall impact makes a significant difference in the page performance

Content Drilldown- This sections drills down to your second level pages and provides you the most popular ones. This kind of provides an insight on specific information your visitors are looking for. Again the bounce rate will tell you if you need to quickly optimize and work on making those pages better.

Top Landing pages: Essentially for your PPC landing pages, you can find out which of your landing pages are performing well.

Top Exit pages: These are pages from where the highest exits happenned.If these pages are your conversion check out page, I think these exits are absolutely fine. But if these are other regular content pages, there certainly is cause for concern. You may want to make these pages interactive and consider including deep internal links. This might help in capturing the attention of the exiting visitors so that they are persuaded into staying longer.

In-page Analytics: This is the best part. What this report does is show you how many clicks the various sections of your webpage receives. Absolutely awesome! You actually get to know where your traffic is headed, perhaps some of the visitors are not even clicking on the links that you really want them to; on the other hand they are perhaps going to some other page because the link to that page is more prominently positioned, or the visitors are actually interested in viewing that page.There are so many things you can derive from this section and work on, it is amazing. The information thta is hiding in the data is just waiting to be found. If you still have not installed an analytics package for your website, my suggestion would be to go ahead and get a free package installed, you will never regret it. And if you find it useful, please drop by and post a line:)

Measuring SEO results and effectiveness; how to find out if your SEO efforts are bearing fruits.

Now that you have website that is live and has gone through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), I am sure you would want to find out if your website is getting traffic because of your SEO efforts. Typically, it may be a good idea to wait for at least six months before you start evaluating your SEO efforts.It takes a while for SEO effectiveness to show up in terms of SEO rankings, traffic etc.

Here is what you can implement in order to get a good idea about traffic to your website -

1.Web Analytics tool

You will need a tool that will help you get data on traffic, keywords etc. Get Google Analytics installed on your website, it is free and provides you a lot of relevant data. Essentially targeted towards tracking paid advertising, it also provides data on organic or natural results.

Go to – http://www.google.com/analytics/

If you already have a Google account, you can login using that id or register for a new account. Before that you can get a taste of what Google Analytics all about out here-
http://www.google.com/analytics/tour.html

Google’s tutorials on analytics are very helpful. I will take up analytics in detail in my next post.

2. Google Webmaster tool

This is a very useful tool for measuring SEO effectiveness and results. I would recommend this to everyone who has a website. This is such a useful tool that it should by default be included in your planning and strategy.To start with go to the Google webmasters help page-
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/

The tool will help you diagnose problems, it will tell you about your website’s accessibility issues, you will find out how many pages link to your site, which keywords were used to reach your site and much much more.

3. Alexa

Alexa will give you an idea about your website’s popularity but it is not absolutely entirely correct since it depends of various factors.

I will take up each of these tools separately in my subsequent posts.But for now, go ahead and get registered for Google Analytics and webmaster tools account. I promise you, these tools will help you in measuring your SEO results to a large extent.

Ethical SEO or ethical Search Engine Optimization, in my opinion, should form the basis of promoting your website online.It is one of the most important aspects of promoting your website .This website is all about SEO best practices , and following ethical Search Engine Optimization while promoting your website online, is the verry essence of SEO best practices.

SEO is very often referred by ethical SEO or black hat SEO.

SEO has evolved into a field that has a lot of demand today. Everyone wants their website to rank within the first 10 results of the major search engines for the most competitive keywords. Today the websites have doubled-tripled but they are competing for the same space.

This has led to services that promise ranking in the top ten in all the major search engines instantly.SEO as such cannot deliver results instantly ever. SEO works on all aspects of your website elements to get your website prepared for competition.

Any instant results or promises of getting your website to rank within the top ten results should set the alarm bells ringing. Believe me no one can promise you top rankings for a specific keyword which is highly popular and competitive. Every site is different and SEO experts work on the USP for each website, some keywords may work for you and some may not. Just because you do not rank for a very popular keyword, it does not automatically follow that your website will not be successful in attracting and retaining visitors. It is in fact very possible to set up your website for success without ranking on top for all the popular keywords. A successful ethical SEO strategy is all about implementing a SEO plan tailored for your website only. SEO experts will not ever ask you to get into any of these instant ranking schemes especially if they have been in the field for quite some time. These promises are usually made by individuals or companies who are not here for the long haul but are fly by night operators.

Before embarking on a SEO project make sure you do a thorough reference check on the SEO company/individual. Black hat SEO may be successful for a bit but if your website gets caught you will be out of the search engines index within no time. Getting your website back in the search engine index is quite a challenging task. More often than not, website owners are not aware of the kind of work the SEO Company did for them. Undoing work that you may not be aware of can be a painful task.

If you want your website to gain visibility fast, the best way to do so would be to start advertising on Google, Yahoo! In the meantime keep working on making your website Search engine and user friendly (Meaning ethical and well planned SEO work)

Most of us have a social networking presence; try to make the most of your social network connections. They will certainly help you gain visibility. Ethical SEO is all about a SEO strategy that involves focused planning so that your target audience becomes aware of your website. It is about improving SEO, about workng on optimizing the SEO perfomance, about analyzing current results inorder to make faster and focused progress . It is about making your website search engine and user compliant.

Here are some articles that you might want to look up if you have launched a site, or if you wish to get information on ethical SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Linking for users
10 SEO tips to improve Search Engine Ranking
Natural search engine optimization
Best Practices for writing effective Description Meta tags
Best Practices-Title tags- How to use titles in Web pages
Ranking for highly Competitive keywords, Is that so important